| Why are some militaries more powerful than others? The answer to this question is important for both scholars and practitioners of international relations. For scholars, knowing why some actors are more capable of generating military force than others facilitates deeper understandings of the factors, dynamics, and processes that drive world politics. For practitioners, such knowledge can improve budgetary and strategic decision-making in an uncertain international environment. Despite the importance of this question, however, current scholarship does not provide a clear answer. This dissertation presents a new framework for thinking about the sources of military power. Drawing on the logic of structural contingency theories of organizational performance, I argue that actualized military power is a function of combatants' capacity to swiftly discern and appropriately react to emergent battlefield developments. Focusing on the role of command and control systems in particular, I advance a "command structure" theory of military power which holds that combatants adopting command structures that best fit the battlefield environment on which they are engaged will be especially effective at translating the human, material, and moral resources they possess into combat capabilities and, very often, win the battles they fight. Using archival and published records, I test this argument in three cases: the battle at Liaoyang in the Russo-Japanese War, the Huai-Hai Campaign in the Chinese Civil War, and the Chinese 5th Phase Offensive in the Korean War. I find that command structure fits constitute a more persuasive explanation of battlefield dynamics and outcomes in these cases than other popular theories of military power, including material preponderance, regime type, manner of force employment, and level of ideational motivation. The nature of the research design and case selection logic employed in this dissertation indicates that considerable faith in the general validity and applicability of command structure theory in the study of the sources of military power across time and space is justified. |
